I had written this several months back and received good quality feedback on it. After a few months where I tightened up the language and cut back a significant part, I have finally put it out. Not expecting a knockout on a first skip, but I hope its an adequate showing.

I was hoping to keep it in the range of a believable size for a microbe or a bacteria, but that is a flaw with this one for sure. I'm hoping to tie it into another skip that I'm writing that could shed more light on the thought process behind it if it can be done.

Is the "message" instructions for the organic nano-machines? How did we translate the signal? Why are so many words in it similar to English words but a couple of characters off? Is it translated or not? How can you "decode" completely alien language or an organic machine's programming language and get broken English?

Hi, thank you for your critique. As I posted above, I was not expecting a knockout blow on my first SCP and I will admit this one is flawed in several distinct ways, but I will answer your questions as best I can.

The message is instructions yes; initially I wanted to have a signal receiver that would take the message and convert it into something simpler but I thought that keeping it simple would be better for this article.

As for why the message appears broken, there's a lot I could offer to answer that.

No language is 100% translatable to another one.

The Foundation's efforts are just the first step; translating some ancient texts takes years and sometimes requires additional eyes on it over time to develop a more coherent translation.

It is akin to military short-hand communication, either due to the need for rapid communication or the resources required to transmit a message across huge distances in space (this was my clearest intention with it)

I was additionally hoping to explore how the Foundation decoded these signals, perhaps through another SCP article or a tale - the initial plan was to have several SCP articles that fed into each other but I've put that on ice for the time being.